Two bare-chested black Moorish boys, wearing turbans of purple silk, red pantaloons and sandals with spiral toes, helped him with his bath, then dressed him in silk small-clothes and a tawny-buff robe decorated with black rosettes.

Casmir descended to the great hall, past an enormous aviary, where birds of many-colored plumage flew from branch to branch. Carfilhiot awaited him in the great hall; the two men seated themselves on divans and were served frozen fruit sherbet in silver cups.

"Excellent," said Casmir. "Your hospitality is pleasant."

"It is informal and I hope that you will not be supremely bored," murmured Carfilhiot.

Casmir put aside the ice. "I have come here to discuss a matter of importance." He glanced at the servants. Carfilhiot waved them from the room. "Proceed."

Casmir leaned back in his chair. "King Granice recently sent out a diplomatic mission, on one of his new warships. They put into Blaloc, Pomperol, Dahaut, Cluggach in G.o.delia and Ys. The emissaries decried my ambitions and proposed an alliance to defeat me. They won only lukewarm support, if any, even though"-Casmir smiled a cold smile-"I have made no attempt to disguise my intentions. Each hopes the others will fight the battle; each wishes to be the single kingdom unmolested. Granice, I am sure, expected no more; he wanted to a.s.sert both his leadership and his command of the sea. In this he succeeded very well. His ship destroyed a Ska vessel which at once changes our perceptions of the Ska; they can no longer be considered invincible, and Troice sea-power is magnified, They paid a price, losing the commander and one of the two royal princes aboard.

"For me the message is clear. The Troice become stronger; I must strike and cause a dislocation. The obvious place is South Ulfland, from where I can attack the Ska in North Ulfland, before they consolidate their holdings. Once I take the fortress Poelitetz, Dahaut is at my mercy. Audry cannot fight me from both west and south.

"First then-to take South Ulfland, with maximum facility, which presupposes your cooperation." Casmir paused. Carfilhiot, looking thoughtfully into the fire, made no immediate response.

The silence became uncomfortable. Carfilhiot stirred and said: "You have, as you know, my personal well-wishes, but I am not altogether a free agent, and I must conduct myself with circ.u.mspection."

"Indeed," said Casmir. "You apparently do not refer to your nominal liege-lord King Oriante."

"Definitely not."

"Who, may I ask, are the enemies you are so pointedly trying to dissuade?"

Carfilhiot made a motion. "I agree, the stench is appalling. Those are rogues of the moors: petty barons, ten-tuffet lords, little better than bandits, so that an honest man takes his life in his hands to ride out across the fells for a day's hunting. South Ulfland is essentially lawless, save for Vale Evander. Poor Oriante can't dominate his wife, much less a kingdom. Every clan chieftain fancies himself an aristocrat and builds a mountain fortress, from which he raids his neighbors. I have attempted to bring order: a thankless job. I am styled a despot and an ogre. Harshness, however, is the only language these highland brutes understand."

"These are the enemies who cause your circ.u.mspection?"

"No." Carfilhiot rose to his feet and went to stand with his back to the fire. He looked down at Casmir with cool dispa.s.sion. "In all candor, here are the facts. I am a student of magic. I am taught by the great Tamurello, and I am under obligation, so that I must refer to him matters of policy. That is the situation."

Casmir stared up into Carfilhiot's eyes. "When may I expect your response?"

"Why wait?" asked Carfilhiot. "Let us settle the matter now. Come."

The two climbed to Carfilhiot's workroom, Casmir now quiet, alert and alive with interest.

Carfilhiot's apparatus was almost embarra.s.singly scant; even Casmir's trifles were impressive by contrast. Perhaps, Casmir speculated, Carfilhiot kept the larger part of his equipment stored in cabinets.

A large map of Hybras, carved in various woods, dominated all else, in both size and evident importance. In a panel at the back of the map had been carved a face: the semblance, so it seemed, of Tamurello, in crude and exaggerated outlines. The craftsman had been at no pains to flatter Tamurello. The forehead bulged over protruding eyes; cheeks and lips were painted a particularly unpleasant red. Carfilhiot pointedly offered no explanations. He pulled at the ear-lobe of the image. "Tamurello! hear the voice of Faude Carfilhiot!" He touched the mouth. "Tamurello, speak!"

In a wooden croak the mouth said: "I hear and speak."

Carfilhiot touched the eyes. "Tamurello! Look upon me and King Casmir of Lyonesse. We are considering the use of his armies in South Ulfland, to quell disorder and to extend King Casmir's wise rule. We understand your policy of detachment; still we ask your advice."

The image spoke: "I advise no alien troops in South Ulfland, most especially the armies of Lyonesse. King Casmir, your goals do you credit, but they would unsettle all Hybras, including Dahaut, to bring inconvenience upon me. I advise that you return to Lyonesse and make peace with Troicinet. Carfilhiot, I advise that you decisively use the might of Tintzin Fyral to bar incursions into South Ulfland."

"Thank you," spoke Carfilhiot. "We will surely take your advice to heart."

Casmir said no word. Together they descended to the parlor, where, for an hour, they spoke courteously of small subjects. Casmir declared himself ready for his bed, and Carfilhiot wished him a comfortable night's sleep.

In the morning King Casmir rose early, expressed grat.i.tude to Carfilhiot for his hospitality, and with no further ado made his departure.

At noon the party approached Kaul Bocach. King Casmir, with half of his knights pa.s.sed the fort after paying a toll of eight silver florins. A few yards along the road they halted. The rest of the party approached the fortress. The captain of the fortress stepped forward. "Why did you not pa.s.s all together? It is now necessary that you pay another eight florins."

Sir Welty dismounted without haste. He seized the captain and held a knife to his throat. "Which will you be: a dead Ulfish cutthroat, or a live soldier in the service of King Casmir of Lyonesse?"

The captain's steel hat fell off, his bald brown pate bobbed as he writhed and struggled. He gasped. "This is treachery! Where is honor?"

Look yonder; there sits King Casmir. -Do you accuse him of dishonor, after mulcting him of his royal money?"

"Naturally not, still-"

Sir Welty p.r.i.c.ked him with the knife. "Order your men out for inspection. You will cook over a slow fire if a drop of blood, other than your own, is spilled."

The captain attempted a final defiance. "You expect me to deliver our impregnable Kaul Bocach into your hands without so much as a protest?"

"Protest all you like. In fact, I'll let you go back within. Then you are under siege. We will climb the cliff and drop boulders on the battlements."

"Possible perhaps, but very difficult." We will fire logs and thrust them into the pa.s.sage; they shall blaze and smoulder, you will smoke and bake as the heat spreads. Do you defy the might of Lyonesse?"

The captain heaved a deep breath. "Of course not! As I declared from the very first, I gladly enter the service of the most gracious King Casmir! Ho, guards! Out for inspection!"

Glumly the garrison filed out to stand scowling and disheveled in the sunlight, hair tousled under their steel caps.

Casmir looked them over with contempt. "It might be easier to lop off their heads."

"Have no fear!" cried the captain. "We are the smartest of troops under ordinary circ.u.mstances!"

King Casmir shrugged, and turned away. The fortress tolls were loaded into one of the wagons; Sir Welty and fourteen knights remained as a temporary garrison and King Casmir joylessly returned to Lyonesse Town.

In his workroom at Tintzin Fyral Carfilhiot once again engaged the attention of Tamurello.

"Casmir has departed. Our relationship is at best formally polite."

"The very optimum! Kings, like children, tend to be opportunistic. Generosity only spoils them. They equate affability with weakness and hasten to exploit it."

"Casmir's temperament is even less pleasant. He is as sin-gleminded as a fish. I saw him spontaneous only here in my workroom; he is interested in magic, and has ambitions in this direction."

"For Casmir, forever futile. He lacks the patience and here he is much like yourself."

"Possibly true. I am anxious to proceed into the first extensions."

"The situation is as before. The field of a.n.a.logues must be like a second nature to you. How long can you fix an image in your mind, then change its colors at your will, while holding fixed lineaments?"

"I am not proficient."

"These images should be hard as rocks. Upon conceiving a landscape you must be able to count the leaves on a tree, then recount to the same number."

"That is a difficult exercise. Why can't I merely work the apparatus?"

"Aha! Where will you obtain this apparatus? Despite my love for you, I can part with none of my hard-won operators."

"Still, one can always contrive new apparatus."

"Indeed? I would be glad to learn this hermetic and abstruse secret."

"Still, you agree, it is possible."

"But difficult. Sandestins are no longer innocent nor plentiful nor accommodating... Eh! Ha!" This was a sudden exclamation. Tamurello spoke in a changed voice. "A thought occurs to me. It's so beautiful a thought that I hardly dare to think it."

"Tell me this thought."

Tamurello's silence was that of a man engaged in a complex calculation. Finally he said: "It is a dangerous thought. I could neither advocate nor even suggest such a thought!"

"Tell me the thought!"

"Even so much is to join in its implementation!"

"It must be a dangerous thought indeed."

"True. Let us pa.s.s on to safer subjects. I might make this mischievous observation: one way to secure magical apparatus is, in blunt language, to rob another magician, who thereupon may become too feeble to avenge the predation-especially if he does not know its perpetrator."

"So far I follow you closely. What then?"

"Suppose one were to rob a magician: who would he choose to victimize? Murgen? Me? Baibalides? Never. The consequences would be certain, swift and awful. One would seek a novice still fresh to his lore, and preferably one with an amplitude of equipment, so that the theft yields a good return. Also, the victim should be one whom he perceives as an enemy of the future. The time to weaken, or even destroy, that person is now! I speak of course in the purest of hypothetical terms."

"For the purposes of ill.u.s.tration and still hypothetically, who might such a person be?"

Tamurello could not bring himself to utter a name. "Even hypothetical contingencies must be explored down several levels, and whole areas of duplicity must be arranged; we will talk more of this later, meanwhile, not a word to anyone else!"

Chapter 13.

SHIMROD, SCION OF MERGEN THE MAGICIAN, early demonstrated an inner impulse of extraordinary strength, and in due course wandered beyond Murgen's control into autonomy.

The two were not obviously similar, save for competence, resource and a certain immoderacy of imagination, which in Shimrod evinced itself as an antic humor and a sometimes painful capacity for sentiment.

In appearance the two were even less alike. Murgen revealed himself as a strong white-haired man of indefinable age. Shimrod appeared as a young man with an almost ingenuous expression. He was spare, long of leg, with sandy-buff hair and hazel-gray eyes. His jaw was long, his cheeks somewhat concave, his mouth wide and twisted as if at some wry reflection.

After a time of loose-footed wandering Shimrod took up residence at Trilda, a manse on Lally Meadow, formerly occupied by Murgen, in the Forest of Tantrevalles, and there settled himself to the serious study of magic, using the books, patterns, apparatus and operators which Murgen had given into his custody.

Trilda was a congenial seat for intensive study. The air smelled fresh of foliage. The sun shone by day, the moon and stars by night. Solitude was near-absolute; ordinary folk seldom ventured so deep into the forest. Trilda had been built by Hilario, a minor magician of many quaint fancies. The rooms were seldom square and overlooked Lally Meadow through bay windows of many sizes and shapes. The steep roof, in addition to six chimneys, disposed itself in innumerable dormers, gables, ridges; and the highest verge supported a black iron weatherc.o.c.k, which served in double stead as a ghost-chaser.

Murgen had dammed the brook to create a pond; the overflow turned a wheel beside the workroom, where it powered a dozen different machines, including a lathe and a bellows for his hot-fire.

Halflings occasionally came to the edge of the forest to watch Shimrod when he went out on the meadow, but otherwise ignored him for fear of his magic.

The seasons pa.s.sed; autumn turned to winter. Flakes of snow drifted down from the sky to shroud the meadow in silence. Shimrod kept his fires crackling and began an intensive study of Balberry's Abstracts and Excerpts, a vast compendium of exercises, methods, forms and patterns inscribed in antique or even imaginary languages. Using a lens fashioned from a sandestin's eye, Shimrod read these inscriptions as if they were plain tongue.

Shimrod took his meals from a cloth of bounty, which, when spread on a table, produced a toothsome feast. For entertainment he schooled himself in the use of the lute, a skill appreciated by fairies of Tuddifot Shee, at the opposite end of Lally Meadow, who loved music, though no doubt for the wrong reasons. Fairies constructed viols, guitars and gra.s.s-pipes of fine quality, but their music at best was a plaintive undisciplined sweetness, like the sound of distant windchimes. At worst they made a clangor of unrelated stridencies, which they could not distinguish from their best. Withal, they were the vainest of the vain. Fairy musicians, discovering that a human pa.s.serby had chanced to hear them, invariably inquired how he had enjoyed the music, and woe betide the graceless churl who spoke his mind, for then he was set to dancing for a period comprising a week, a day, an hour, a minute and a second, without pause. However, should the listener declare himself enraptured he might well be rewarded by the vain and gloating halfling. Often, when Shimrod played his lute, he found fairy creatures, large and small,* sitting on the fence, bundled in green coats with red scarves and peaked hats. If he acknowledged their presence, they offered fulsome approbation and asked for more music. On certain occasions fairy horn-players asked to play along with him; each time Shimrod made polite refusal; if he allowed such a duet he might find himself playing forever: by day, by night, across the meadow, in the treetops, higgledy-piggledy through thorn and thicket, across the moors, underground in the shees. The secret, so Shimrod knew, was never to accept the fairies' terms, but always to close the deal on one's own stipulations, otherwise the bargain was sure to turn sour.

*Fairies maintain no specific size indefinitely. When dealing with men they often appear the size of children, seldom larger. When caught unawares, they seem on occasion only four inches to a foot tall. The fairies themselves take no heed of size. See Glossary II. Fairies share with humans the qualities of malice, spite, treachery, envy and ruthlessness; they lack the equally human traits of clemency kindness, pity. The fairy sense of humor never amuses its victim.

One of those who listened as Shimrod played was a beautiful fairy maiden with flowing nut-brown hair. Shimrod tried to lure her into his house with the offer of sweetmeats. One day she approached and stood looking at him, mouth curved, eyes glinting with mischief. "And why would you wish me inside that great house of yours?"

"Shall I be truthful? I would hope to make love to you."

"Ah! But that is sweetness you should never try to taste, for you might become mad, and follow me forever making vain entreaties."

"'Vain', always and always? And you would cruelly deny me?"

"Perhaps."

"What if you discovered that warm human love was more pleasing than your birdlike fairy couplings? Then who would beseech and who would follow whom forever, making the vain entreaties of a love-sick fairy maid?"

The fairy screwed up her face in puzzlement. "That concept has never occurred to me."

"Then come inside and we shall see. First I will pour you wine of pomegranates. Then we will slip from our clothes and warm our skins by firelight."

"And then?"

"Then we will make the test to learn whose love is the warmer."

The fairy maiden pulled her mouth together in a pout of mock-outrage. "I should not flaunt before a stranger."

"But I am no stranger. Even now, when you look at me, you melt with love."

"I am frightened." Quickly she retreated and Shimrod saw her no more.

Spring arrived; the snows melted and flowers bedizened the meadow. One sunny morning Shimrod left his manse and wandered the meadow rejoicing in the flowers, the bright green foliage, the bird calls. He discovered a track leading north into the forest which he never before had noticed.

Under the oaks, thick-boled with sprawling branches, he followed the trail: back, forth, over a hillock, down into a dark glen, then up and through a clearing, walled with tall silver birches, sprinkled with blue corn-flowers. The way led up over an outcrop of black rocks, and now, through the forest, Shimrod heard laments and outcries, punctuated by a reverberant thudding sound. Shimrod ran light-footed through the woods, to discover among the rocks a tarn of black-green water. To the side a long-bearded troll, with an extravagantly large cudgel, beat a lank furry creature hanging like a rug on a line between a pair of trees. With every blow the creature cried out for mercy: 'Stop! No more! You are breaking my bones! Have you no pity? You have mistaken me; this is clear! My name is Grofinet! No more! Use logic and reason!"

Shimrod moved forward. "Stop the blows!"

The troll, five feet tall and burly, jumped around in surprise. He lacked a neck; his head rested directly on the shoulders. He wore a dirty jerkin and trousers; a leather cod-piece encased a set of very large genitals.

Shimrod sauntered forward. "Why must you beat poor Grofinet?"

"Why does one do anything?" growled the troll. "From a sense of purpose! For the sake of a job well done!"

"That is a good response, but it leaves many questions unanswered," said Shimrod.

"Possibly so, but no matter. Be off with you. I wish to thrash this b.a.s.t.a.r.d hybrid of two bad dreams."